Program Design

We Focus on Achieving the Goals of Your Assessment Program

We are an educational assessment company. It’s what we do — and we do it well in no small part because of the expertise that our assessment services and program management teams bring to our program design.

Our program design process, informed by more than 40 years of practice, is replicable and process driven. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room in there for our clients’ unique needs, standards, and goals. We build our programs to accommodate configurability where it makes sense and flexibility where it will have the most positive impact.

Expert Planning and Program Management Get the Process Started Right — and Keep the Program on Track

The initial meeting with our program management and assessment services staff lays a foundation for the entire assessment design process. During this critical phase, we become a team — with one shared vision for achieving goals and milestones.

Discipline and Fresh Thinking Keep Our Assessment Services Team at the Forefront of the Industry

Whether building a new assessment or making changes to one that already exists, our highly-credentialed, research-driven assessment services staff infuses excellence, fairness, and quality into every aspect of their work. They champion the use of established best practices and the most promising assessment innovations. They explore ways to develop new item types that offer richer authentic assessment, including performance tasks designed to assess critical thinking and program solving skills. And they are committed to training local educators to contribute to the assessment process, including item writing and review, standard setting, and more .

Our work begins with:

Defining the scope of the project

Scheduling deliverables

Exploring standard setting, the types of items to be included, the way the test will be constructed, and much more, if we’re developing a new assessment

Introducing the program manager who will serve as the client liaison to the rest of the Questar team and keep everyone up-to-date about progress, deadline, and changes

Program Management services include

Program management

Program evaluation

Project scope and scheduling

Communication planning

Assessment Services include:

Item development for English language arts, English language proficiency, mathematics, science, and social studies

Leadership of item writer workshops for local teachers to help meet clients’ needs for large item banks in a significantly more cost effective and efficient way

Evaluation of items against the standards of fairness and quality established by the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education

Refinement of assessments — reworking items, redesigning the test structure, and more — to maximize effectiveness

Questar Assessment

5550 Upper 147th Street West
Apple Valley, MN 55124

Corporate Office
952.997.2700

Customer Service
877.997.0422

Sales
800.800.2598

Scoring Center
952.997.2727

About Us

Questar Assessment Inc., a wholly-owned, independently-operated subsidiary of Educational Testing Service, is a K–12 assessment solutions provider focused on building a bridge between learning and accountability and raising expectations about what it means to be an assessment partner.